Lars Weiler

As I upgraded my Desktop (the PowerPC G4 Pegasos) and my Laptop (a P4m-based HP) to the gcc-4.1.1/glibc-2.4-toolchain last weekend, I still had to do the complete emerge -e world, so that all installed packages can make use of the upgrade.

The Pegasos began at Tuesday – and compiled until Saturday. With five breaks due to problems with the new toolchain. But it seems that we upgraded nearly every package to a version which work with the new toolchain on ppc. The system seems to be a little bit faster now, and genlop confirms that.

The rebuild on the Laptop was really horrible. It broke quite often and took even longer than on the Pegasos, although I have quite the same packages installed. I had to run emerge --resume --skipfirst for about 20 times. Seems that the x86-stable-tree isn't ready for gcc-4.1.1/glibc-2.4 yet. The other drawback of that laptop is it's damn small fan, which is noisy like a hurricane. It is like with dogs: the smaller they are, the louder they are barking. I had to sleep with earplugs so that I don't have to listen to that evil sound.

Before I started the rebuild I switched off X, just to save some of my worthy 512MB of RAM. It was a funny experiment, if I can live without X. I recognised that I could do most of my work, as I use a lot of terminal-applications. This includes muttng for e-mail, irssi for IRC, vim as editor, mpd with ncmpc for music, and as framebuffer-applications mplayer and fbida for video and images. Even watching TV with mplayer on DVB was possible. Unfortunately I can't call framebuffer-applications from screen, which I usually use on terminals, as I configured it in a way that it shows me some important system-information.

But wherefore I need X? Well, mostly for a nice webbrowser like firefox. You can handle Bugzilla with lynx, but not Wikipedia or 90% of other websites. One might say, that there is links2 with framebuffer support, but it isn't that usable. I really miss tabbing (I got used to it six years back with Galeon...).

Then I use some KDE/QT-applications which make my life easier. I don't use a calendar that often, usually I store dates in brain. But korganizer is quite handy for an overview (although I forget to note down dates quite often). Then I have akregator running for my news-subscriptions. And with the newest version in KDE-3.5.3 it is finally usable, as it can show the author of each article! I recognise that I use amarok quite often during the last months, but that's mostly for podcasts and tranferring them onto my music-player. Finally I use psi as a graphical web-application as I don't like centericq...

The last application wherefore I really need X, is a proper PDF-viewer. In the past I used xpdf on ppc and Acrobat Reader on x86. But the first is ugly and the second one really slow. So I'm glad that there is kpdf which is really usable now and has quite all features I need (like fullscreen-mode for presentations). Also it is a really fast PDF-viewer.

Sometimes I wish I could live without X. As it is faster and I better like the “mouse” with 104 keys than the one with three and a scrollwheel. It's nice to see all those shiny graphical applications for e-mails, IRC or editing files. I don't need them. I like my terminal (preferred urxvt in X) with screen, my mutt, irssi and vim open. Like in the old DOS days I started my computer-life with. Am I too old?